FAITH AND FREEDOM
Theocon Moment
Needed: More Sam Brownbacks, fewer Pat Robertsons.
Political movements are often labeled by their enemies. "Neoconservative" was an insult Michael Harrington hurled at Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol during their journey rightward; "queer" was a slur before it became a badge of empowerment (and impenetrable academy theory). So perhaps it's time for religious conservatives to stop complaining about the term "theoconservative"--coined by Jacob Heilbrunn in 1996 and popularized by Andrew Sullivan, among others--and accept it with a wink and a grin, as the kind of backhanded compliment that any successful movement earns from its opponents.
This a good time for such considerations, because the last, limping years of the Bush administration find religious conservatives in a position of unusual strength--flush from victory in the Roberts and Alito confirmation battles; relatively untainted by the stumbling and scandals afflicting the GOP; and stronger, in numbers and credibility, than most of their rivals for control of the party. "National greatness conservatism" has foundered, at least temporarily, on the rocks of Iraq, while the starve-the-beast right looks in the mirror and finds the beast staring back, wearing Jack Abramoff's fedora. Which means that for the moment, the closest thing to a credible public philosophy the GOP has to offer emanates from the once-unlikely alliance of evangelicals and Catholics, and their God-infused politics of social reform.
Reform isn't a word you often hear associated with the religious right, of course--and the people who decide such things decided long ago that religion mixed with conservatism yields the scent of brimstone. But contemporary "theoconservatism" is best understood as an heir to America's long line of Christ-haunted reform movements--the abolitionists and the populists, the progressives and the suffragettes, the civil-rights crusaders and even the antiwar activist of the middle 1960s, among whom Richard John Neuhaus (now the "theocon in chief" to his enemies, but then a man of the religious left) cut his teeth.
Like the Victorian reformers who strove to mitigate the worst consequences of the Industrial Revolution, religious conservatism, at its best, is a response to the excesses of the sexual revolution--the fatherless children and broken homes, the millions of abortions and the commodification of human life. The eras aren't parallel, but there are similarities: The Victorian reformers passed the laws against abortion that "theocons" yearn to restore, and waged war against the same kind of crude, politicized Darwinism that's associated with the contemporary culture of death.
Today's religious reformers have it harder, though, because yesterday's progressivism is still with us, hardened into a leadership class that benefited considerably from the sexual revolution, and that perceives any attempt to restrain its evils as a threat to their hard-won liberties. Meanwhile, in one of the ironies of American politics, the Christian right finds itself sharing a party with the same business interests that Victorian Christians struggled against--interests that are often indifferent to social reform, and that provide fewer votes to the Republican Party but often claim a greater portion of its spoils.
Given these obstacles, religious conservatives have made great strides--but for now, at least, they have changed American politics without fundamentally changing America. There have been gains: The abortion rate has dropped, and the country is marginally more pro-life than 30 years ago; the divorce rate has dropped as well; and the erosion of religious faith that prompted Time magazine to ponder the death of God has been halted, though not necessarily reversed. The push for euthanasia has been largely turned back so far, and if the courts are not yet prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade, there is greater reason for pro-life hope than in the 1970s or the Clinton years.
But the losses have been considerable as well: the pornographication of the public square; the ever-rising illegitimacy rate and the continuing crisis of the black family, mitigated but hardly solved by America's draconian imprisonment policies; and the slow but steady advance of a new eugenics. And "theoconservatism" has failed, thus far, to capture the winnable political middle, either through compromise or through persuasion.
This center is moody, oscillating from left to right--against nearly all abortions one day but ready to defend Roe v. Wade the next, supportive of stem-cell research but anxious to protect embryos, yearning for moral standards but wary of being told what to do. And it's here that religious reformers need to do more work--incrementally but steadily, forging compromises and finding allies along the way, and fighting battles on their opponents' territory rather than their own.
This probably means being willing, in a possible post-Roe world, to ease in regulations on abortion slowly and with relatively mild penalties, rather than leaping immediately to a ban even in cases of rape and incest, as South Dakota recently did. It means focusing energy on issues that have the potential to expand your base--as vouchers and school prayer do, say, with African-American voters--rather than on controversies that shrink it, like crusades against STD vaccines or gay Teletubbies. It means avoiding the temptation to federalize issues, like gay marriage and the fate of Terri Schiavo, that most Americans would prefer be kept local.
More broadly, it means finding a rhetorical mode that is moral without being moralistic, religious without being sectarian--and finding a new generation of leaders who are more articulate and less polarizing than the last. More Sam Brownbacks, for instance, whose vision encompasses Third World poverty, prostitution and prison reform without sacrificing any urgency on issues of life and death--and fewer Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells, jowly bigots who seem to think that shaking their fists at America is the best way to persuade it to repent. More artists like Mel Gibson or investors like Philip Anschutz, the Christian billionaire behind "The Chronicles of Narnia," who are comfortable advancing religious ideas within the confines of the cultural mainstream, and fewer culture warriors who sneer at Hollywood and then churn out dreck like "The Omega Code." And more women, above all--as speakers, as writers and as candidates for office, so that the next time a president signs a piece of pro-life legislation, he (or she) won't need to do so on a platform filled with middle-aged men.
Such symbolism matters a great deal, because religious conservatism's opponents would rather marginalize the movement than argue with it; the term "theocon" was originally meant to conjure up theocracy, and of late it's been losing ground to "Christianist," the better to link pro-lifers to Osama Bin Laden. The double standard is obvious: When a Catholic archbishop urges believers to flout immigration laws, the New York Times calls it "a startling call to civil disobedience, as courageous as it is timely," yet Christians who oppose gay marriage are accused of rolling back the Enlightenment. But it's an effective strategy even so, and religiously motivated reformers have a tendency to play to the stereotype--spurning compromise and dialogue, and damning America as irredeemably corrupt, as many did during the Clinton years.
Such marginalization--by a liberal establishment that disdains them, by a GOP that co-opts a few of their ideas and ignores the rest, and by their own tendency to march uncompromisingly into irrelevance--is the greatest danger facing religious conservatives. It would consign them to a place in history alongside the populists, another movement that burned brightly but then guttered and went out, with its most ambitious goals unfulfilled and its greatest spokesman, William Jennings Bryan, reduced to a figure of bien-pensant mockery for his opposition to evolution.
But they may well escape that fate. Religious conservatives have moved from a seat at the GOP table to a place near its head; now they need to find a way to carry their ideas into the American middle, tempering their own bigotries and bad habits along the way, and mixing the innocence of doves with the political wisdom of serpents. And if they succeed, there's a good chance that the "theocons"--like the Progressives or the civil-rights reformers before them--will some day be able to look back over the patient work of decades and see a nation transformed by their labors.
Mr. Douthat, an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005).
